The Orange Pi 4 LTS should be more widely accessible than its predecessor.

 To work around ongoing component shortages, the new OrangePi 4 LTS SBC swaps out a few parts.

With the addition of a few harder-to-find components, the Orange Pi 4 LTS should be more widely available than its predecessor — or competitors.

Shenzhen Xunlong, the company behind the Orange Pi line of single-board computers, has announced the Orange Pi 4 LTS, which offers many of the same features as the Orange Pi 4 but uses more widely accessible components.

The newest member of the Orange Pi family, which was born out of the success of the Raspberry Pi line of single-board computers, has some outstanding specs in a small package. The Rockchip RK3399, with two high-performance Arm Cortex-A72 cores and four lower-power Cortex-A53 cores with a maximum speed of 1.8GHz and an Arm Mali-T860 graphics processor, lies at the heart of the board.

Orange Pi has also included 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, a 16GB eMMC on-board storage option that can be expanded via microSD, gigabit Ethernet, and a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0 radio with an external antenna. There are twin MIPI DSI, two USB 2.0 ports, one USB 3.0 port, and a USB 3.0 Type-C port, as well as two MIPI CSI camera connections, and HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.2-over-USB Type-C video outputs supporting 4k video at 60Hz. A mini-PCI Express (mPCIe) connection is also available for hardware expansion.

In a nutshell, it's nearly identical to the Orange Pi 4, but with just 4GB of RAM rather than up to 8GB. It's almost there, but it's not quite there: The suffix "LTS," which stands for "Long Term Support," suggests that the board was created to address component shortages for the original Orange Pi 4.

As a result, the previously required 16GB eMMC chip has been made optional, the AP6256 radio module has been replaced with a CDW 20U5622, the Realtek RTL8211E Ethernet module has been replaced with a YT8531C, and the 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header has been replaced with a 26-pin version based on the first Raspberry Pi models.

Apart from these differences, the performance and compatibility of the Orange Pi 4 and Orange Pi 4 LTS should be equal, with the same customised Android, Debian, and Ubuntu operating system images.

The board, together with an optional 16GB eMMC chip, available for $72.90 plus $4.05 shipping; the company has verified that parts would be dispatched early next week.

Official Website: Orange Pi